This invention relates to an electronic musical instrument capable of editing sound parameters by monitoring a display screen such as a liquid crystal panel and thereby setting and changing tone color etc. of a musical tone.
Further, this invention relates to an electronic musical instrument capable of synthesizing various musical tones by variously changing data such as parameters and, more particularly, to an editing device of an electronic musical instrument for performing editing of data including changing of data setting.
There is a known electronic musical instrument which can set a filter characteristic which imparts tone color change to a waveform signal and an envelope shape which imparts an envelope to a waveform by using various sound parameters and can provide a variety of tone colors by changing these sound parameters. These sound parameters are stored in a memory for each tone color and a tone color of a tone to be sounded is determined by reading sound parameters of a selected tone color from the memory and imparting them to respective parts of a tone source.
For changing set sound parameters, i.e., editing sound parameters in the known electronic musical instrument, types and values of sound parameters are displayed in parallel on a display screen such as a liquid crystal panel and an editing operation is made by changing the sound parameter values displayed on the display screen.
In the known electronic musical instrument, however, numerous parameters are displayed on the display screen and it is difficult to find out object parameters to be edited from among the numerous parameters. If an arrangement is made to individually display parameters with respect to each part of a tone source and thereby display only parameters of a part which is currently to be edited, the number of parameters which are displayed at a time will be reduced. This arrangement, however, will make it difficult to understand relation between the currently edited part of the tone source and the remaining part of the tone source with the result that inconvenience in the editing work remains.
On the other hand, recently developed electronic musical instruments can synthesize not only tones of natural musical instruments and human voice but also other various tones which cannot be produced by natural musical instruments. By selectively setting suitable parameters matching a music piece performed from among numerous parameters defining tone colors, envelopes and effects of musical tones, the player can cause the electronic musical instrument to synthesize a desired tone corresponding to the selectively set parameters.
There has recently been the tendency that the number of parameters set in an electronic musical instrument is constantly increasing. Therefore, for producing, for example, plural tone colors in an electronic musical instrument, there is an increasing demand for editing of parameters such as reading desired parameters from a storing medium storing parameters and setting the read out parameters in an electronic musical instrument, and exchanging parameters between an electronic musical instrument and a storing medium. There is also a case where it is necessary to copy parameters set in an electronic musical instrument to other storing medium or the like.
In prior art electronic musical instruments, an editing operation has been made by previously selecting an editing operation mode for editing parameters etc. (e.g., a swap mode for exchanging data, a copy mode for copying data and a delete mode for deleting data) and thereafter designating parameters which will become an object of the selected operation mode.
In a case, for example, where desired parameters are to be copied from a storing medium, the editing mode is first set to a copy mode and then parameters to be copied are designated in the storing medium and a position to which the parameters are to be copied is designated in the electronic musical instrument whereby parameters are copied from the storing medium to the electronic musical instrument.
In the known electronic musical instrument, therefore, an actual editing operation has to be made only after selecting a desired operation mode and it is troublesome to select and set a desired editing operation mode.
Further, in performing a copy editing operation in the known electronic musical instrument, a series of operations from "copy" to "data in region A" to "to region B" has to be made against a flow of thought from "data in region A" to "to region B" to "copy" and this makes it difficult to casually perform a copy editing operation according to an operator's flow of thoght.